Which takes you to the third thing that happens over again which is how quickly you become the Universal Caretaker when YOU are the sorry ass loser who needs the HELP, giving your socks to the black woman on welfare and holding the hand of the lumpy 50-year old woman who is actually maybe 28. You find yourself dialing the number of the boyfriend of the crack queen with the Alice Cooper mascara drool face. No really, you are on the payphone calling for her even though she has choke bruises around her neck, she begs you to call him so you do, you intervene, you become an objective outside resource, you tell him to call and drop the charges so she can get out since it is so obvious that he has abused her and later in life she will have one helluvuh case, one in which you will be a witness of course, watch out guy, you teach Women’s Studies, and he proceeds to describe to you what she did to his living room and his cat and his motorcycle with a baseball bat and the house on fire before he calls you a fucking cunt whore ignorant bitch and hangs up.
Undeterred, you find yourself calling the guard to get the fat woman some Tylenol as you listen to the Christian chick with a silk scarf and a screw loose self-narrating her experience with the guy from the hotel bar who she believed was there for the Jesus on Ice convention. All of this activity suddenly takes its psychosomatic toll on you and your morning after green puke bellied nasty kicks in and you realize with a kind of brick to the lower spine feeling that you have to take an enormous scotch shit. Which you take, of course, in front of everyone, like cons have to, no matter how much the outfit they are wearing costs, no matter how beautiful a martyr they make, no matter how pretty the letters Ph.D. look after your dumb ass Visiting Writer name, you still have to shit in the presence of a crowd.
Weird, huh.
You close your eyes.
You breathe.
You are not sorry yet for what you have done.
You are simply an incarcerated woman.
Remorse, she came later. Lemme throw it into reverse.
Let me tell you who I hit.
Collision as Metaphor
THE PERSON I HIT IN MY HEAD-ON COLLISION WAS A 5’ tall brown skinned woman.
In the moment, this did not upset me. In the moment, I was drunk as a monkey, and so the entire scene that night looked a little like things were in slow motion and smeared over with Vaseline. And at a tremendous distance from my heart and whatever it might have said. Addicts have a problem comprehending gravitas. Everything just looks blurry.
My airbags deployed. Pow. If you have never had that experience, it’s quite something. It’s loud. Like gunshot loud. And everything smells like dynamite. If you were holding the steering wheel with both hands, your arms get heat and friction burns on the insides. Your head, because it didn’t hit the windshield, smashes face first into the Michelin Man surface of the airbag; then your head jets back and knocks your noggin against the headrest. Afterwards, you just sort of sit there and wait for the dust to settle and your brains to recollect themselves. It helps to close your eyes and wait for everything to stop moving.
The person I hit in my head-on collision was a 5’ tall brown skinned woman who had no English.
I know that she had no English because, after I sat there trying to feel whether or not anything was broken or searing me with pain — which it wasn’t, particularly since I had anesthetized myself with the bottle of scotch — I opened my car door and looked around. My car, a red Toyota Corolla, was weirdly angled and had its face smashed in. Her car, a white … I’m not sure — it looked something like those old Gremlins — her car was smashed in on the left side all the way up to the windshield. Something warm and metallic filled my mouth. I’d bitten my tongue. I saw the woman sitting on the guard rail, crying, saying things I didn’t understand. Her hair was more black than the night around us. She had a lump the size of a golf ball on her forehead. No airbag. Her skirt was white and billowed out at times.
The person I hit in my head-on collision was a 5’ tall brown skinned pregnant woman who had no English.
How I knew the woman carried life in her gut is that her belly had the unmistakable mound of a child. Six, possibly seven months of child mound. At the time, this did not alarm me; as I said, I had the sensitivity of a drunk. Though I did feel a prickle of something far far inside my abdomen. I sat down next to her. She began to wail and hold her belly. I said, “Are you in pain?” She did not look at me or answer. Dumbly, I put my arm around her shoulders. I have no idea why she let me do that. She rocked. Inconsolably.
I didn’t feel anything. No, literally. I couldn’t feel my hands, my feet, my ass. I couldn’t feel my own face.
The woman fumbled in her skirt pocket and pulled out a cell phone. I thought perhaps she was fingering 911, but she was not. I could see she was trying to dial a number. Someone she knew. Someone to help. I couldn’t manage my own cell phone. I looked at it in my hand. I couldn’t see any numbers, or how to activate the thing. It sat like a dead rodent. I noticed I smelled faintly of piss.
I don’t know how long we sat there. The sound of cars whizzing by comforted me. After a while three cop cars and an ambulance showed up. I remember the sound of sirens trying to out-do one another. The cops blocked off the bit of road we were on — the overpass between north and southbound lanes. I cupped my ears with my hands. I remember the red white and blue lights flashing all around us. Something about the swirls of color looked like we were inside an underwater scene.
The cops immediately separated us. Her, they took over to the ambulance. Me, they asked me if I felt OK and I replied with a quite obviously soggy yes. They had a paramedic come over and “check me out” but no one was very worried about me since I could walk and talk. I hadn’t a bruise or bump or cut on me, other than the airbag burns on my inner arms. My distinguishing characteristic: shit-faced. The emotions all went in the direction of the pregnant woman and her unborn child. Except mine. Mine floated toward nothingness.
While the cop put me through my paces, nearly all of which I failed in that ever so slight way that is inevitable given the amount I’d consumed, I thought of my mother. Literally — when the cop had me close my eyes and attempt that finger to the nose thing? I saw my mother’s face. Puffy with drink and covered in sadness … not a maternal, Madonna sadness. A sadness made from joy being siphoned from your life a year at a time.
I have a photo of my mother when she was a girl. It was between leg and hip operations. In this photo she was not in a body cast. It was probably taken a few years before my grandmother divorced my grandfather for molesting my mother’s sisters. She looks to be about 13. It is the sweetest girl face you have ever seen, but something in the tilt of her head, something in the lowered gaze, you can already see the sadness in her.
I know this isn’t true, but in some ways, I can see the woman who would pick up a bottle of vodka and never put it down. I can see the bottle of sleeping pills. The marriage that went so horribly wrong, and still she couldn’t leave. I can see the mother whose children drifted so quickly away from her like fish cut loose. I can see the Cancer that came to the rescue, for as her sister said to me shortly before she died, “Every day of her sweet life she was in pain, of one sort or another. At least now she’ll have peace.”
Where does repressed pain and rage go in a body? Does the wound of daughter turn to something else if left unattended? Does it bloom in the belly like an anti-child, like an organic mass made of emotions that didn’t have anywhere to go? How do we name the pain of rage in a woman? Mother?